The Woman’s Party speakers took advantage of all kinds of situations. In one town, Maud Younger found that a circus had arrived just ahead of her. There was no adequate hall for a meeting; and so the circus men offered her their tent; they even megaphoned her meeting for her. In another town, a County Fair was being held. Maud Younger appealed to the clowns to give her a chance to speak, and they let her have their platform and the spot-light while they were changing costumes. In San Francisco, Hazel Hunkins scattered thousands of leaflets from an aeroplane flying over the city. Red Lodge, Montana, sent to the train, which brought Abby Scott Baker to them, a delegation of members of the Grand Army of the Republic, the leader bearing a large American flag. They conducted her in state through the town to the hall where she was to speak.
Perhaps no campaign was more interesting than that of Rose Winslow in Arizona. Vivian Pierce, whose experienced newspaper hand on the Suffragist helped to make that paper the success it so swiftly became, thus describes her work:
Rose Winslow represented the workers. She spoke for the exploited women in Eastern industry. In her own person to her audiences she typified her story of those imprisoned in factories and slums, unable to fight their own battles. Her words had the authenticity of an inspired young evangelist. She herself had come up out of that darkness; and the men of the mines and lumber camps, the women of the remote Arizona towns, listened to her with tears pouring down their faces. One does not see Eastern audiences so moved. At Winslow ... this girl, pleading for working women, the most exploited class in industry, appealed to the men of the great Santa Fé railroad shops that animate the life of that remote region on the edge of the “Painted Desert.” Rose Winslow had been warned that if she spoke at this town, she would be “mobbed” by the Wilson Democrats. After her impassioned story, told one noon hour, the men of the shops crowded around this young woman from the East, “one of our own people,” as one man said, and asked her what they could do for the women of the East....
In the remote copper camps around Jerome and Bisbee, the story of the industrial workers who have merely asked for a chance to help themselves, made a deep impression on the foreign-born voters of this section. There were Poles, Finns, and Lithuanians in the great audience held in that copper town that is the working-man’s annex to Bisbee. That audience both laughed and cried with Rose Winslow, and then crowded around to greet her in her own language.
From the vividly colored fastness of the miners’ villages in this wild mountain region, to border towns like Nogales, though but a short step geographically, the temper and character of the cities change.... In places like Nogales, the soldiers who could not go home to vote turned the Woman’s Party meetings into near-riots, so anxious were these victims of a peace administration to hear what the ladies had to say about Wilson. The soldiers registered their approval by helping take up collections, though even the provost guard could not remove them to give space to citizens able to register their protests.
An event equally picturesque marked the closing of the campaign on the night of Sunday, November 5, on the platform of the Blackstone Theatre, Chicago. There, Harriot Stanton Blatch, acting as the spokesman of the disfranchised women of the East, called up by long-distance telephone a series of mass-meetings, one in each of the twelve Suffrage States and repeated their message—a final appeal to the women voters of the West to cast their ballots on the following Tuesday against President Wilson.
The result of the election is summed up in the Suffragist of November 11:
In Illinois, the only State where the vote of women is counted separately, over seventy thousand more women voted against Mr. Wilson than for him....
The reports indicate that the Woman’s Party campaign was as successful in holding the woman’s vote in line in the other eleven States as in Illinois. While ten of these States went for Wilson, they did not do so, as has been claimed, by the woman’s vote. Mr. Wilson received in these States almost the solid Labor vote, the Progressive, and the farmer’s vote. The popular majority which Mr. Wilson received in the twelve Suffrage States amounted only to twenty-two thousand one hundred seventy-one out of a popular vote, according to the latest returns, of more than four million, eight hundred and ten thousand in the same States. This does not include the Socialist and Prohibition vote, which was very heavy in some of the Western States....